OVERVIEW OF THEASSIGNMENT

You are in the process of researching a topic of your choice that relates back to the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which is our next unit.

Attached HERE you will find the document that was distributed in class on Monday. You are to complete the entire packet.

COLLECTING EVIDENCE

Collecting evidence is not exactly fun. It takes a long time to find the information that you will want and it involves reading a lot to find a little. I want you to be prepared for this process before you begin.

When you are consulting the databases (which sometimes require a password: try buford or cordless to access them), you should search your topic or search related ideas to your topic. When you find a source which you think will be beneficial, you should scroll to the bottom of the page to find the source citation information. This information will be what you will need to create your Works Cited page as well as to find your parenthetical citations.

THE WORKS CITED PAGE

This is a sample Works Cited page. Notice the formatting; it is very important. Notice how the title is written. Notice the upper right hand corner. Notice that the entire page is evenly double spaced without any extra spaces between the two listed sources.

Notice this sample Works Cited page. It has some cleverly disguised tips for formatting listed inside the information!

You will create a Works Cited page. The Works Cited page will come at the end of your paper. It will be the final paper stapled to your writing.

The title of the Works Cited page is ONLY Works Cited. Notice that the only capitalized letters in the title are the W and the C. The title of the Works Cited page is not underlined, nor is it boldfaced or highlighted or made any larger or smaller than the rest of your writing.

The upper right hand corner of the page will feature your last name and the page number.

The entire page is double spaced. This will stand if your Works Cited page is hand written or typed. Recognize that the only two lines which are not indented are the lines that first introduce the source. I can clearly see that there are TWO sources here because the only lines that are not indented are lines 1 and 5, whereas lines 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, & 8 are indented.

The entire page is also put in alphabetical order. If all of your sources (which come from the Source Citation found on the database), have authors, then you will alphabetize your sources according to the last name of the authors.

If you have a mixture of authors and article titles (that means that there is not author listed and the Source Citation begins with the article title in quotes), then you will alphabetize according to the article title AND the authors last name.

THE PARENTHETICAL CITATION

Parenthetical Citations are used to help your reader identify where you learned your information. We slip parenthetical, or in-text, citations into our writing as a means of saying to our reader, "Hey, reader! This is where my information came from! Look, I'm telling you where I found it so you can't say that I plagiarized!"

In order to figure out what your parenthetical citation will be, you first need to identify your source citation. Your source citation is the information that you wrote down when you found an article that you knew that you could use as evidence.

The first step in identifying my parenthetical citation is being sure that you have identified the correct source information from the database. You will find the source citation information either at the top or the bottom of the article or there will be a tab on the left or right side of the page that you can click to bring up the source information. Remember to select MLA when choosing the source information!

For example: If my research topic were on the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, and I found an article about her life on the history database, my source information has been identified as the following :

Because this is my source citation, which is what will go on my Works Cited page, I now need to find my parenthetical citation. The parenthetical citation will be the last name of the author (if there is one provided) or the title of the article (there will always be one of these).

Is there an author listed above? No. So the parenthetical citation is going to be the title of the article which is

("Harper Lee").

Using the Parenthetical Citation

Here is a sample typed first page with parenthetical citations. Notice formatting!

When you are summarizing/paraphrasing the information that you have found while you are researching, you will need a parenthetical citation to follow your paraphrasing. If you are writing a paragraph that features information from one source, at the end of the paragraph you should have a parenthetical citation before the final period.

An example of parenthetical citations within a text would look like this:

She was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama and eventually grew up to attended Huntingdon College ("Harper Lee"). >>>> notice the above statement is a summary of information and has a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence, but before the period, in order to indicate that the information preceding it came from that one source.

REMEMBER: formatting is important. Article titles must be in quotes and the period must come outside of the second parentheses.

Using Different Source Citations in the Same Paragraph

Sometimes when a writer completes their research, they discover that ideas about a topic found in one article are not found in another article about the same topic.

When this happens, and when a writing researcher decides to combine the information found from two (or more) sources into one paragraph, then the writer will need to use different parenthetical citations in order to differentiate where they found their information.

FOR EXAMPLE: I am writing a paper about Harper Lee and I am using two different sources (one source with an author and one source without). The two Source Citations that were both found at the bottom of the article on the database or found by clicking the source citation button are listed as the following:

Given that I have these two articles, my sample paragraph might look something like this:

While Harper Lee wrote only one novel in her life, she still won great critical acclaim from both fellow authors and a worldwide audience almost instantly ("Harper Lee"). Despite this fame, she was reluctant to speak with journalists about the novel and would often demand that they leave her alone and respect her privacy (McKinnell). Since that time, Lee has remained reclusive by living in Alabama and while there have been rumors of a suspected second novel, she has never produced one ("Harper Lee").

<<<<<< Notice in the above paragraph that while the writing centers on Harper Lee, I have used two different sources for my information. I managed to differentiate between the two sources by including an appropriate parenthetical citation at the end of each sentence. Please notice the punctuation (periods & quotation marks).